20 The Sunday Times May 22, 2022
NEWS REVIEW
‘Wagatha Christie’ captivated the nation
but the footballers’ wives Alison Kervin
met felt trapped in gilded mansions
Anxious,
paranoid,
sad — life’s
no ball for
the Wags
W
here did it all go
wrong? What hap-
pened to the smiley,
pouty Wags who went
stomping through
Baden-Baden during
the 2006 World Cup in
their cowboy boots
and hotpants, wearing
earrings so large they
got whiplash every time they turned
around? They spent enough in that
pretty German village to clear the debt of
an African nation then bounced happily
to the hairdresser’s in floaty kaftans to
have their blonde extensions renewed.
There was much to dislike about the
overindulgence and self-importance of
the England team’s Wags — wives and girl-
friends — back then, but at least they
seemed to be having a fine old time,
united in their joy at the riches and atten-
tion they were getting. Led by the singers
Victoria Beckham and Cheryl Tweedy,
they paraded through the streets like a
carnival troupe, moving in colourful
herds, from shops to bars and back to the
shops. But all that colour and joy seemed
a distant memory last week at the High
Court, as the libel case brought by Reb-
ekah Vardy against Coleen Rooney
revealed the world of a Wag to be a more
complicated, divisive and troubled place
than the immaculately arched eyebrows
of yesteryear led us to believe.
But I knew this already. About 15 years
ago, when the Wag was in her heyday, I
began research for a series of novels that I
planned to write. I was a sports reporter
for a national newspaper, usually more
focused on what was happening on the
pitch than off it, but I’d seen the Wags’
exploits in Baden-Baden and thought it
looked theatrical and glamorous — the
perfect setting for comedy.
Sure, the term Wag was reductive and
anti-feminist, but it had captured peo-
ple’s imaginations. The women at the
false stories appear in newspapers? “Yes,
a lot,” she said.
The judge has now retired to consider
a verdict in the High Court case, but a
WhatsApp exchange between Vardy and
her husband Jamie shown last week
underlined the sense of paranoia and
grievance that false stories can create. In
one Wayne Rooney, then England cap-
tain, had approached Vardy’s husband
with concerns that her column in The
Sun was disrupting the squad during the
2016 Euros. “Seriously????” she asked
her husband in disbelief. “No not at all
babes x,” he reassured her. “Twats trying
to make me into a scapegoat,” Vardy
fumed in response.
Brook’s response to stories was more
measured: she distanced herself from the
people who sold them and exercised cau-
tion around them. But then she had been
famous for a long time — future Wags are
often very young when they meet their
footballing beau. One girl I spoke to was
just 19 and had never been out of her
home city in the north of England. When
her boyfriend moved to Chelsea FC, she
had to leave behind everyone and every-
thing she had ever known. She settled in
Oxshott, a leafy village in one of the
wealthier parts of Surrey. Her house was
extraordinarily grand, set in acres of
land. Every day she waited behind its
intimidating gates for her boyfriend to
come home. She said she always felt
alone. Her partner had team-mates,
coaching staff, fans and agents running
around him; she felt she had no one.
She was scared to talk to people
because she feared they wanted to
befriend her not for her dry wit or intel-
lect but because her boyfriend played forInstead of having
friends to lean on,
many felt they
could never truly
trust the otherscentre of it seemed to be living out the
dreams of six-year-olds in a Barbie-pink
world full of free shoes and enough
champagne to kill a man. I planned a
tongue-in-cheek, humorous account, but
I wanted to have a look at what reality for
these women was truly like. What I dis-
covered, from the half-dozen or so
women to whom I spoke, on the condi-
tion of anonymity, was sobering.
Many of them were living a lonely exis-
tence coloured by fear and anxiety. Their
lives were defined by playing second
best, which led to worry and isolation.
Other women, other players, agents, the
media, the clubs, the national team man-
ager and even those closest to them often
seemed as if they were out to get them.
“An ex-boyfriend was sending me all
these abusive letters once, and I was
really worried. I wanted to tell my hus-
band, but he was away with the club, so I
told his agent,” one Wag said. “He told me
not, under any circumstances, to tell my
husband until after the game. I felt as if
my safety was far less important than his
football match.” This feeling was so
strong, she told me, that she sometimes
felt that if she died, “they’d wait until
after the whistle to tell him”.
One might think this would lead to
camaraderie among the women, a shared
understanding of life as the partners of
leading players. Perhaps there would be a
support network of sorts, shoulders to
cry on, friends to lean on. The women to
whom I spoke certainly viewed each
other with a lot of affection, but many felt
they could never truly trust the others.
“You can never confide your fears in the
other wives because they will tell their
husbands that you’ve been moaning, and
their husbands will tell yours,’ said one
woman. ‘That would be a nightmare.
You’re on your own. I talk to my mum
about my relationship, but no one else.’
During one evening out with a group of
four Wags, they all assured me they wereloyal to and would tell one another if they
heard any rumours about their men.
Over the course of my research, however,
it emerged that each did know something
about the other women’s husbands or
boyfriends but had been sworn to
secrecy by their own, who had told them
the gossip in the first place.
Fame adds another layer of fear. Every
famous person has read something about
themselves and wondered how the story
got into the newspaper. Journalists thrive
on being tipped off and sold juicy tales by
the families and friends of famous peo-
ple. I worked with Kelly Brook on a book
project about ten years ago. The model
and radio host, who has been the partner
of three rugby players including Danny
Cipriani and Thom Evans, was enor-
mously good company and revealed the
inner workings of her life. She told me
that when she met someone new, she told
them a small lie about herself and if it
appeared in the paper, she knew they
couldn’t be trusted. And did any of theO
nly a few years ago, it
would have been
inconceivable that a
third of Britons would
be pouring cold water
mixed with a small amount of
ground oats on to their cereal
or into their tea and coffee
and paying double the price
of dairy for the privilege.
Yet here we are.
One in three Britons
consume plant-based milk at
least some of the time,
according to research from
Mintel, compared with one in
seven five years ago as the
trend extends far beyond
vegans and the lactose-
intolerant.
Leading its meteoric rise is
the Swedish firm Oatly, the
world’s largest oat milk
company, which confirmed
last week that it is building
one of the globe’s biggest
factories for plant-derived
dairy products.
The Peterborough site, due
to open early next year, will
be able to produce
450 million cartons of oat
milk per year. Oats will come
from British farmers for the
first time and the factory will
supply the UK market.
How has it converted so
many people so quickly to oat
milk in a country that has
been putting cow’s milk into
its tea since the 18th century?
“Guilt,” says Jayne Buxton,
60, author of the forthcoming
book The Great Plant-Based
Con. Racked with shame and
a sense of helplessness about
climate change, many people
have turned to an easy and
tangible change they can
make — switching to non-
dairy milk — Buxton says. “ItBy 2020, the
company
had been
valued at
$2 billionis virtue signalling. It allows
people to not have to think
about the carbon footprint of
everything else in their life.”
Many would argue this
guilt is well-placed because of
the fact that the world’s
1.5 billion cows release
harmful methane into the
atmosphere. Oatly says that
“in general, cow’s milk has a
higher climate impact than
oat drink” and that its own
climate footprint is as little as
the equivalent of 0.31kg CO 2
per kg.
However, Buxton says we
have accepted the claim by
businesses such as Oatly that
plant-based substances will
“improve our health and save
the planet” without analysing
or challenging the science.
Oatly’s marketing has
focused on the polarising
concept that dairy is bad and
should be “ditched” and that
oat milk is good. It caused
controversy last year with an
advertising campaign called
“help dad” aimed at arming
young adults with
information that could
convert their “milk-
defending” parents to plant-
based food “for the sake of
the planet”.
The advert capitalised on
what dairy producers say is a
rising “cancel culture”
involving dairy. A survey by
Arla, the UK’s biggest dairy
producer, found that nearly
half (49 per cent) of Gen Z felt
ashamed to order dairy in
front of their peers. The
Advertising Standards
Authority ruled that the
scientific evidence behind the
green claims in Oatly’s “help
dad” campaign “was notsufficient”. Oatly admitted it
could have been clearer.
The dairy industry believes
the impact of dairy farming
on climate change is being
overstated and points to
analysis published by the
department for business in
2017 which puts agriculture
in fifth place as a contributorto greenhouse gas emissions,
behind transport and
residential housing.
What is not in dispute is
the way Oatly has succeeded
in making “hippy” plant-
based milk trendy. Its
investors include Oprah
Winfrey, the rapper Jay-Z and
the actress Natalie Portman.
This is a world away from
when it first launched almost
30 years ago. Rickard Oste
created the concept for Oatly
in the early 1990s while he
was a professor of applied
nutrition at Lund University.
He was exploring whether the
by-product of oat bran could
be turned into a non-dairy
drink. By 1994 the first patent
had been filed and by 1997 his
brother Bjorn had come on
board as an investor.
Rickard, 73, who remains
its main shareholder, has
recalled: “We tried to sell it toOatly’s unstoppable rise to the top
The Sackler family is blamed
for the US opioid epidemicIt hurts to
say it, but
we’ve got
pain all
wrong
W
hen Anoushka
Anand woke up with
a swollen knee, she
thought she must
have knocked it. She
waited for the pain to subside
— but it grew a lot worse. “I
was in agony. But my GP said
it was just growing pains or a
virus.” She was told to rest
and take paracetamol.
Anand was 18, and it took
three years to receive a
diagnosis — rheumatoid
arthritis and osteoarthritis.
Now 33, she has undergone 12
operations to her hips, knees,
ankle and spine, and life is
dominated by pain. Strong
painkillers — oxycodone and
tramadol — only take the edge
off. “The pain is there all the
time,” said Anand, a hospital
healthcare assistant in
London. “I can never get it
down to the level I’d like.”
A study of 4,000 UK adults
published by Ipsos last week
found 26 per cent were living
with chronic pain — defined
as lasting longer than three
months — and concern is
growing about medicine’s
inability to deal with it. Draft
guidelines published last
month by the National
Institute for Health and Care
Excellence, the NHS clinical
watchdog, advised that
patients with osteoarthritis
would do better to exercise
than take paracetamol. A
study this month concluded
that ibuprofen and other anti-
inflammatory drugs can
make back pain worse. In the
US, meanwhile, the Sackler
family’s opioid painkillers
have been blamed for half a
million deaths.
A key problem is that
scientists do not understand
enough about complex and
long-term pain. Dr Benjamin
Ellis, a consultant
rheumatologist and seniorthe milk industry [in the
1990s] and they basically
laughed me out of the room,
but who’s laughing now?” He
and Bjorn are said to be
worth an estimated
£450 million.
A former pop singer, Toni
Petersson, 54, was hired as
the chief executive of the
company in 2012, after a spell
running a backpack
company. He hired an old
friend, John Schoolcraft, as its
chief creative officer. He
created the new logo and
covered the cartons with
witty slogans. One even read:
“This tastes like sh*t. Blah!”
By 2020, the company was
valued at $2 billion, but faced
criticism when it sold a 10 per
cent stake to a consortium
that included Blackstone, a
private equity firm that has
been accused of contributing
to deforestation in the
Amazon.
Oatly ran into trouble again
last year when it sued the
Cambridgeshire family-
owned Glebe Farm company
claiming its PureOaty brand
was too similar to its own.
The allegations were rejected
by a judge last summer.
Kiti Soininen, who heads
the food and drink team at
Mintel, points out that Oatly
had managed to transform
plant milk from something
drunk by “hemp-wearing
hippies” to the masses. “It
has a fresh, humorous, even
rude tone and has pushed the
boundaries,” Soininen said.
Based on sales, it would
appear that many Britons
were eager for rebellion in
the dairy aisle.
@Louise_Ecclesadviser to the Versus Arthritis
charity, calls pain an alarm
system for the body.
“The brain produces the
feeling of pain to say: ‘Stop
what you are doing,’” he said.
“That’s a simple pathway and
it’s easy to block with anti-
inflammatories like ibuprofen
or opioid medicines like
codeine or morphine.” But
with long-lasting chronic
pain, “the alarm can become
oversensitive and sometimes
just goes off for no reason”.
Pain caused by a back strain
or surgery is now being
generated by the brain itself.
Last year British doctors
were told to stop prescribing
painkillers for “chronic
primary pain” — unexplained
or “out of proportion” to an
injury or disease — and offer
counselling, antidepressants
or acupuncture instead.
Specialists are increasingly
aware that chronic pain has
psychological and social
elements. Stress and trauma
can exacerbate symptoms.
Patients need assessments to
manage “their understanding
of what pain is and what it
means”, said Dr John Hughes,
dean of the Royal College of
Anaesthetists’ faculty of pain
medicine.
This is a difficult message
to communicate when many
patients — and doctors —
believe pain to be a simple
manifestation of an injury or
disease that should be easily
treated with a medicine.
“When the drugs don’t
work, the temptation is to
add more tablets, increase
doses,” said Ellis. “We need to
get back to an older tradition,
really spending time listening
to the patient. This broader
approach [helps] people
reset their faulty alarm
system, and chronic pain
becomes a smaller
Oatly has taken aim at dairy with its irreverent marketing proportion of a fuller life.”It has milked veganism but the Swedish firm’s ruthless ways can leave a sour taste, says Louise Eccles
Before reaching
for the drugs, we
should try talking,
says Ben SpencerChelsea. “It takes a while to realise these
people aren’t friends; they’re people
who want to be in your world because of
who your boyfriend is. If you split up
tomorrow, you’d never hear from them
again. My boyfriend told me to keep away
from hangers-on and be friends with the
other wives and girlfriends.” Presumably
he thought other Wags wouldn’t be the
ones leaking stories about them.
Looking back, it seems as though the
phenomenon of the Wag reached such
prominence for a couple of reasons. To
some extent it was because of the way the
women looked — a group of long, lean
women in tiny skirts and skin hovering
between brown and orange on the paint
charts is always going to brighten news-
paper pages. But they also offered a kind
of fame that was tantalisingly achievable
for young girls. Very few of us are going to
be among the greatest footballers in the
country, but you could live a life like
Coleen Rooney if you met one in a bar —
and unlike, say, George Clooney, these
are global stars who do actually hang out
in bars in Manchester and Liverpool on a
Saturday night. It’s an alluring concept.
Rooney was one of those girls who met
her husband-to-be when she was a
schoolgirl. She and her husband have
had their ups and downs, many of them
documented in the press, but they are
still together and seem happy. Indeed,
many footballers seem to be in relation-
ships that are happy and fulfilling. But
when I peeped under the canopy all
those years ago, I found a number of
women who were rudderless, scared and
alone. The drama of the “Wagatha Chris-
tie” case isn’t new, it’s just that now we
can all watch it playing out in court.Cheryl Tweedy, Coleen Rooney and Victoria Beckham watch an England match during the 2006 World Cup in GermanyKEVORK DJANSEZIAN/AP